


i’ll eat you whole, i love you so

by detectivemeer



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abuse, Depression, Falling In Love, Identity Issues, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Natasha Romanov/Sam Wilson, Not Canon Compliant, POV Second Person, Recovery, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-01 11:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6517699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/detectivemeer/pseuds/detectivemeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Have you heard the one about the guy who suffers seventy years of systematic abuse? No? It’s a riot! Let me start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i’ll eat you whole, i love you so

**Author's Note:**

> title from “Breezeblocks” by alt-J.  
> tbh this is less a fanfic and more a therapy session for and with myself, so,

i.

Your name was never James.

ii.

Your name was never James, but it’s not a bad one, as far as names go. Short and to the point, but soft on the tongue.

“Hey,” Steve laughs; he can do that. He laughs around his words, around your (the) name, he has so much breath to spare. “Careful with that.”

You think, _I can shoot him in his throat; he’ll gurgle and gurgle and drown._ You say, “Yeah, sorry.” You settle the gun in a firmer grip. Steve’s still chuckling, rubbing the back of his head. He bumps his shoulder against yours. Careful, gentle, slow. Sweet. He smells sweet, a kind of fruit.

You smile at him. “We should get some cantaloupe on the way home.”

“Sure, Buck. Whatever you want.”

-

Here is a list of what Bucky Barnes wants:

To die.

To die.

To have never been born.

To rain fucking hellfire down on every last one of these goddamn Hydra fucking bastards.

To die, die, die.

-

Here’s an uncompleted list of what you want:

To stay in your apartment and eat an entire loaf of bread.

To kill someone, slowly, agonizingly slowly: with your bare hands, with their blood on your chin, to tear them apart.

A shower.

To lie down on the kitchen table and peel skin from muscle and muscle from bone. To lay each strip out on the ground.

Pop Rocks.

-

Here’s an uncomfortable question from your therapist (the new one, not the old one).

How are you feeling?

Here’s the lie you said: Fine.

Here’s the lie you thought: Shut the fuck up, Christ, you fucking idiot.

Here’s the truth: Fine but with a side of how would it feel to break through the window and fall on the asphalt outside. How many bones would you break and what would they look like, sticking out of you.

-

It’s not fair because if Bucky Barnes was there and you could pick him apart, it would only hurt him, and if he tried to pick you apart he’d never be mean enough.

Hydra was good, mean, hard, hard, like a fist thumping your chest or a nice clean baseball bat swing to an elbow.

-

Apples. That’s what Steve smells like. Fuckin’ cliché.

-

Wilson called it the Revenge Tour in a text to Romanoff. Romanoff texted back an emoji with its tongue sticking out.

It’s not about revenge, really.

You’re either in Ukraine or Moldova. The GPS is still smoking in the explosion and you can’t tell if you’ve made it over the border yet. You’re headed west through a forest and it’s not like you have a goddamn passport or anyone would bother to stamp it, anyway.

Steve drools on your shoulder.

His mouth keeps getting jostled open, his head swaying back and forth. You can’t feel it through the padding but it’s disgusting. You entertain the relief of dropping his dead weight and kicking his nasty drooly chin. Forests are the fucking worst. Revenge is not worth all these bugs up your ass and leaves slapping you in the face. You could be on a beach somewhere right now. You can’t imagine what you’d do on a beach, but the possibility still rankles.

You drag Steve’s drooling ass all the way to the first town you stumble across and brush off your Romanian. You text Romanoff and Wilson on a newly acquired burner, slap some gauze on Steve, and pass out on a lumpy motel bed.

“Donut?” Wilson offers you, in the morning. You take three. One chocolate, one with sprinkles, and one with a sticky white glaze.

“Morning,” Steve says, looking up at the ceiling. Romanoff is stitching his ear back together. The glazed donut is lemon poppyseed. You sink your teeth into it with fervor.

“Nice job giving Ukraine a new crater,” says Wilson, pilling donuts on his plate to stake claim. Smart. You’re already rifling through the box again, picking out another chocolate.

Steve winces. Needle, or bad op? But then: you know him. ( _You know him?_ Well, he’s an open book. For fuck’s sake, he’s practically gushing. He _wants_ you to know him. He gives himself over to you on a silver platter every day. And yet here you are. Empty, empty. There’s barely room up here for you, let alone him.) He’d rather chew a mouthful of needles than let an op go south.

You suck chocolate off your thumb and say, “Unexpected reinforcements. We got what we came for.” You got: to watch someone you didn’t recognize scream and slam on the locked door of a room on fire. The world got: one less Hydra base. Steve got: that look on his face, proud and scared and buoyant, when you fought together, when you saved him. Success. Go team.

You reach over and take a coconut crusted donut off Wilson’s plate. He takes your sprinkled one.

It’s not about revenge. He can think that, Romanoff can, Steve can (he doesn’t, but; he can). But it’s not.

You want to hurt them. You _want_ to hurt, something, anything. They hurt you, yes. But they are impossible to touch. The specific ones. The ones who held the syringes, who held you down, who watched you scream. They are too scattered. Your mind is too scattered. Hurting unknown faces of an anonymous “they” means nothing. But it feels good. If you’re not outside, breaking things, you’ll die. You can feel it. The violence clings for only so long. You can sit and eat donuts now but that fresh death will fade and if it’s not them it’s you. Hell hounds are the only living thing inside you. They’ll get their blood, and as long as you keep feeding them, it won’t be yours. Romanoff says something that makes Steve and Wilson both burst with laughter.

-

You think of an old riddle, or saying, or--

There are two dogs inside you. One good, one bad. Who you are depends on which one you feed.

Don't be naive. It has nothing to do with you. Those dogs'll tear into each other all by themselves so it doesn’t matter, in the end. You can keep the bad one fat and happy and it’ll kill the other for sport. You can starve it long as you want and it’ll kill the good for meat. The outcome is still the same. The blood in your chest is still hot and wet and hungry.

Tick-tock, there’s a bomb in your stomach. Tick-tock. Stagnation: no, no, no, no. Kill yourself. No good, no good.

Steve’s the same. He pretends like he couldn’t be, but his violence is marrow deep. His body is better at fighting than living. He doesn’t have to like the truth for it to be true, and you know the truth.

So: _of course_ , he finds his excuse, his noble sacrifice, to sink down deeper, deeper. He tells you _you don’t have to_ and _don’t owe anybody a thing_ and _i_ _t’s your life, Buck, you can have whatever you want._ You don’t remember much but, God, he was always this dreamer wasn’t he? Like life doesn’t have them all strapped in and falling off a cliff. Like there’s any ending to going against the tide that’s not drowning.

You can have nothing you really, really want. You can have nothing but what is meant for you. This life is not yours and it never was. You are here to kill and take and take. You’re hungry for it. You’re not here to own a thing, least of all yourself.

First time you’re called out you smash the butt of your rifle clean through an alien’s head and purple viscera is splattered all over you. The monsters under your skin sing. _This_ is what you get, _this_ is what you are.

-

The wood of a shovel, rough, good. Dry palm around the dry handle, chafing, burning. No gloves, don’t be dumb. Blade filled with dirt. Heft it over your shoulder. Repeat.

-

“Hello,” you greet your reflection, “I’m Bucky.”

“Hello, I’m James--James Barnes.”

“Hello, I’m--”

“Hello,” you say. You smash the glass and put a piece in your mouth. “Um Jams Barnes.” You speak carefully so as not to cut yourself. Saliva pools around the shard. To swallow, or not to swallow. There’s a dirty joke in there, but it’s not funny if no one’s around to flinch at it.

You tilt your head forward so the glass slides from your open mouth and into the sink. A string of saliva connects you and sticks to your chin. You scrub it away.

Hello, you think. Hello Bucky, hello.

-

“Steve,” you say, smile sweet-as-pie. Steve would like to save sweet, sad, broken James Barnes very much and James Barnes would like to let him. You could kiss him with razor blades tucked in between your teeth and he’d thank you for it. “You great dope. I’ve got your back, you know that.” Your mouth is bright and bared and flirting. It toes the line just enough.

He looks at you with huge, sad eyes. The softest mouth you’ve ever seen; you could tear him to shreds. “I know.”

-

You haven’t seen her since the day you left her in that tiny room, with her big fists held in a parade’s rest behind her back, face silent and still, bruised from your training, but she looks exactly the same. Her fierce frown wrinkles are a little deeper, but her eyes are the same and her voice still thick with cigarette smoke. You stub the butt out on the concrete porch step where it fell from her fingers.

She stares, open-mouthed with shock. “Soldier.”

No, actually it’s--

“May I come in?” You bat your eyelashes a little. She swallows and shuffles back from the entrance, screen door biting your heels as you step inside.

Dottie serves coffee in two plain blue mugs that taste like licking a car tire. You sit on a disgusting plaid cloth couch. She was one of the first spiders to crawl their way out of the crack of this particular door. She didn’t know you, but she sees you, like they all flinched, like they all feared, admired. She’s built something like peace, in her small, shitty house, her lived-in skin and chosen couch. You consider standing up and slamming a chair against the wall, watching it shatter to the ground in satisfying chunks.

“You look,” she chews the inside of her cheek for a second and tucks a brittle white curl behind her ear, hand shaking, “different.”

The laughter cracks your ribs and bursts out of your chest like some wild animal. You can taste blood on your tongue. She looks at you like she’s never seen you before, and she hasn’t, has she. Not you. Not _you_.

“Dottie,” you grab her hand with both of yours. You can feel her frightened heartbeat under your fingertips. Her fear feeds your grin until your whole face hurts. “You have _no_ idea.” And God doesn’t that _burn_ , doesn’t it? It burns you, brand to flesh. The _knowing_. You can feel the wrongness, the weight and shape of it, but you can’t name it, can’t even see it, point to it so others can see too.

She rips her hands away from yours. She says, “I see,” and then she smiles, like she knows all the answers to the universe, leans back, and says nothing. Not when you drink your coffee, poke around her fireplace’s mantle, not when you slam the door behind you. _Irrelevant_ , says her silence, and she knows it. This is what you get, visiting the past.

-

Somewhere there’s a knife big enough to carve all the secrets out of him.

-

But what is the past, really? Philosophize for a moment: nothing, it’s _nothing_. Gone in an instant, you can never touch it or know it again. A haunting thing, lingering like smoke. The smell in the back of your throat. But it’s not _real_ , anymore. Now is the only real thing. The past is a deception you sell to yourself, a lie you can’t forget, a lie that makes you.

“Um,” says Sam Wilson, slowly lowering the glass of orange juice from his lips. He studies you for a brief moment, sets the glass on his counter, says, “I’m not big on philosophy, to be honest. But you want my two cents, the past is apart of us. Not everything, but a part. Yeah, there’s no time like the present and all, and you can’t go back, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ripples, that things that are done and over with can’t still reach out and affect you. And the past may make us, but it doesn’t control us.”

You sit at his kitchen table and stare at him. He stares back, then sighs.

“You know, when I invited you all here for breakfast, I was expecting a knock first.” Then he mumbles, slightly under his breath, “Can’t imagine _why_ I thought that.” He shakes his head and glances at you again. “Well, since you’re here. Want to chop some peppers?”

You stand. He turns his back to open the fridge but you know he’s hyperaware of you, though the casual facade is a smooth one. You accept the red and green peppers and pull a knife from your boot.

Sam wrinkles his nose. “Seriously? No way, I don’t where the hell that thing’s been--or _who_ the hell it’s been in.” He pulls a long cutting knife from a drawer and you tuck your own knife away, begin slicing the peppers in long, thin strips.

“You like spicy food,” he asks, sprinkling some oil in a pan and clicking the burner on. Fire licks at the frying pan’s edges after a quiet _whoosh_ , and then shrinks to a tiny flame rolling against the bottom.

You shrug.

“Good, because Steve can’t handle anything. Nat and me send these little videos when he eats something too spicy and starts to blush and sweat. We haven’t made him cry yet, but Natasha got ghost peppers from… honestly I don’t want to know where from, and you know Steve, that man can’t back down from a bet to save his life.” He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, grins so fondly you almost look away.

“Mmm,” you say.

Sam stirs mushrooms, onions, and herbs in one pan, melts butter in a second for bacon to fry in. He turns his oven on to preheat and says, “Would you mind turning the radio on? I hate cooking in silence. It’s in the corner there, yeah. Thanks.”

The peppers chopped, the music flowing, he asks for you to start beating a large bowl of eggs together.

“Super soldier and spies,” says Sam, mournful. “My grocery bills are getting ridiculous. Natasha’s so tiny, too, I don’t know where she packs it away. But I’ve never seen someone devour an entire pizza like her.” He shudders. “All it had on it was anchovies, too. She’s hardcore, man.”

“Anchovies,” you say, trying to--what? Commiserate? It comes out too flat.

Sam nods. “Salty little fishes. Not a fan, myself.”

You _know_ what they are. You didn’t say you didn’t and anger rushes up as a response. Some eggs spill over the side of the bowl, drip onto Sam’s counter. Sam hums along softly to whatever song squeaks out of his radio, laying down the first few strips of bacon. You want, ridiculously, to thank him for something. But you don’t, of course.

-

There are days when you want to pluck your eyeballs out and days when you lie on your side and stare unblinking at the wall for a few hours. There are these days, too:

You’re smoking a cigarette because you want to, and it feels right; it matches the tone of the day. Gauzey gray clouds blotting out the sun. Wind kissing your nose icily. Three layers; shirt, hoodie, jacket. Knitted gloves, heavy boots. You stomp around to keep your blood moving, hands cupped over your mouth, flicking your dead lighter, trying to catch a spark against your new smoke.

“Needa hand?” A blue-haired girl asks, stepping forward with a matchbox. You nod, extend the cigarette. She lights it quickly and drops the flaming match into the snow piled at the curb. It sizzles a slow death.

Nowadays, therapy leaves you with the jitters or a sick feeling in the deepest pit of your stomach. It’s better, you suppose, than rage or a near catatonic calmness. You have to walk back to the apartment to shake off whichever gift the day decides to bless you with. Today, you bought an iced strawberry frappuccino with extra whipped cream to try and numb your trembling hands. Today, it is mothershitting cold as fuck and you’re waiting at the busstop instead of trudging the extra blocks home. It’s the future, full of indulgences, like heated buses and ice cream when it snows.

The girl watches you, eyebrows raised at your drink. “Isn’t that cold?”

You shrug. It is; your mind keeps seizing with brain freeze. You take a loud slurp.

She makes a face. She’s short, dark-skinned, and has excellent teeth. You shake another cigarette out of your pack and offer it to her.

“Nah, I’m trying to quit.” She pauses, rolling her tongue over her bottom lip. “But since I’m already next to your secondhand… what’s the difference, right?” She strikes another match and then drops that one next to its predecessor, forming a small v in the snow. Her hair and clothing are modern, stylish to someone, probably. College kid, you think. Her backpack is covered in pinback buttons, floral patterns and crude sayings and poorly resized photos of people smiling. The bus screams to a stop in front of you, crushing the snow and matches under its wheels. She’s halfway up the steps before she turns to look at you, questioning.

“Not my bus,” you lie, easy. She flashes you a smile and a wave and the door closes with a hideous squeak. You watch exhaust rise from the tailpipe until it turns down a new street and you turn in the opposite direction of where you’re supposed to go, start walking.

There are kids with backpacks and arts and crafts pinned to them. There are girls with blue hair and matchboxes. You throw away the plastic cup with a third of your drink left, because this world is made of excess. Warmth wriggles in your chest. You might be fucked beyond belief but there’s something not unlike comfort to the fact that this world doesn’t give a good goddamn. There will be buses and matches and strawberry milkshakes and things you can’t imagine, will never get to see. But they’re real, all the same. They are real.

-

Steve gets hurt, because he’s slow, he’s always so slow.

His suit is light, he’s quick on his feet, but he’s bogged down by those morals, by that drive to _save_ , always, no matter the cost to himself.

So Steve gets hurt.

First, it’s detached. He’s injured. You assess the damage. Severe blood loss and head trauma are the immediate issues. His arm doesn’t look so good either. His blood smells like blood, his face is grease streaked and slack. You haul him over your shoulder, keeping your right arm securely wrapped around him. He makes a noise but he’s not fully conscious.

There’s satisfaction, maybe even pleasure, in the wet, hard sound the bullets make, ripping from your gun and through skulls. Maybe there’s a cruelty in your raised, still arm, steady hand. But it doesn’t much matter, dead is dead, when they hit the ground they don’t care if you intended to hurt them more than you needed. Dead is dead. Death is nice, clean and cold. The thought starts to suck away some of the goodness in your gut, watching their heads explode, so you don’t linger on it.

Romanoff takes Steve off your hands. Half of you is smeared with blood. Someone’s fingers peep out from under your boots. You shoot the chest the arm’s attached to, just to be sure.

“Winter Soldier,” says a man. Romanoff and Sam are bundling Steve up for transport, trying to staunch the bleeding. Sam’s hands don’t shake, not at all.

You turn your head in the direction of the voice. He’s got a gunshot wound to the leg and a thick neck. His mouth is sprinkled with spit, his eyes bloodshot.

You dodge his shots, ducking your head a split second before slamming into him. Bones snap and he lands, head cracking against asphalt, with all the breath knocked out of him. You grab a fistful of his thinning hair and step a foot on his throat. His fingernails scrape uselessly off your metal forearm. You press down, but not enough to break his neck, flattening his airway just so. You tighten your grip and pull.

The gush of blood is incredible. You hop back, not wanting to deal with the gummy dried blood that will jam up the soles of your boots. You toss the head in an underhand arc; it lands somewhere in a pile of rubble, out of sight.

Romanoff is speaking into an earpiece, staring at you, unblinking. Her mouth moves too fast and too far away for you to make out the words. She doesn’t like messes and she doesn’t like unpredictability so she doesn’t like you. But she does love Steve. You’ve been coasting on their friendship to keep the two of you civil, but. You hand drifts to your hip, fingers curling around your gun.

“Barnes! We got Steve on a chopper, if you want to follow we gotta go now!” Sam yells, waving you down a few yards away from Romanoff. You jog to him, meeting Romanoff’s stare as you pass.

Steve’s uniform is cut away, he’s got five needles poked into him. The gaping wound on his side is hideous, raw red meat and shiny black blood. You kill the urge to shove your way into the helicopter and kneel by his side, turning instead to go to Sam, wings out and arms extended.

-

Steve takes three days to wake up, which is impressive, considering. You feel angry at him anyway.

Sam downloads a bright game onto your phone. You spend most of those seventy-two hours dangling off plastic chairs, trying to kill cartoon pigs.

When Steve wakes up (really wakes up, not just flutters his eyes or twitches his fingers) he winces at the light. You flick a rubber band at the switch and he sighs in the darkness.

“How do you feel?” you ask, because that’s what people ask in hospitals.

“Fucking fantastic.” Steve groans, struggles to sit up. He really shouldn’t be, but it’s not like you could stop him. He rubs at his face, and then, sneezes.

You toss him a tissue box.

“Thanks,” he mumbles. A couple of balled up tissues land in the waste basket, a perfectly thrown arc. He shoves the box on the tall, wheeling tray by the bed and pours himself three glasses of water before he makes a small, tired sigh.

“Three days,” you offer.

“Is everyone--”

“Yeah. You’re the only one who likes to get chunks bitten out of him.”

Steve laughs, pained. “I--”

“I tore a head off a guy.” Steve blinks, eyes refocusing on your shadowed figure in the corner of the room. “I’ve never done it like that before. Just popped right off.” You smack your lips on the ‘p’. “Like a champagne cork.”

“Christ, Bucky.”

“He was a bad guy, if that’s better.”

“That’s not--” Steve sighs, again, digs some more sleep from his eyes.

“I’m not a child, I know it was--” you search for something like the truth. “It wasn’t a nice kill. I could’ve just stabbed him, broke his neck. But I was angry and I wanted to see what would happen.” You pause. “My therapist says I should be sharing my feelings more, so.”

Steve laughs again, but this one is worse. “Well, I’m glad you feel comfortable sharing with me.”

“What’s the grossest kill you’ve done?”

Steve’s features chill. “I’m not--”

“C’mon. Quid pro quo. I ain’t gonna tell anybody. It doesn’t even have to be the absolute worst, just one of ‘em.”

Steve’s quiet for a long time. He doesn’t blink so neither do you. His eyes are a strange blue, amidst the machines’ blinking LED lights and the weak dawn sunlight trickling through overhead windows. Glinting and dark and unwhole.

“It was the war. We--the Commandos--split up to clear out bombed houses. I remember the soot, the ash, the black. The air was still thick with smoke, all those bodies. For a while back then I was worried that the serum really was temporary, that I would just snap back into myself at any second. And it being so hard to breath, I kept thinking my asthma was going to come back, that I’d die there without any of you around me.”

He clears his throat, stares at the cheaply threaded sheets of his bed, continues, “Anyway, he came out of nowhere. Stabbed me with a broken chair leg.” Steve’s left fingers ghost over the long healed wound. “That hurt. He had these huge eyes, too, I remember. Green. They felt like the only thing I could see. I just--reacted. I grabbed his head and slammed it against the wall. I could, I could see--the brain and bone just--” He swallows, folds his hands in his lap.

“That was the worst?”

Another laugh. He shakes his head. “Not close to it, but. You know.” He shrugs. “It was the first time I realized how dangerous I was. I was scared shitless of myself, I couldn’t even--well. It doesn’t matter.” He looks at you again, knowing. “You happy with that?”

You lean back, picking your elbows up off your knees, and steeple your fingers in front of you. “Yeah. That’s good.”

Steve fiddles with a little alert button. “I should call the nurse.”

“Why? So Big Pharma can pump you full of more drugs?” You shake your head. “I snuck you in some chamomile tea, we’ll get you set right. Grab a few more hours and then Sam and me’ll help you bust out of here.”

This laugh is nice, warm, rough, exhausted. Steve. “Thanks. And hey, Buck.”

“Mm?”

“Please change your clothes, you look like you wandered off a horror movie set.”

You look down at your gear, crusted in Steve’s blood. When you glance back up, Steve’s asleep again, head tilted to the side. His mouth is rose petal pink, parted slightly. The line of his nose, the broken bump, that strong jaw, those mile long lashes, brushing softly over the curve of his cheek. You stare him for a few minutes more, until you’re sure he’s deep under. The chair creaks when you stand up but your feet are silent on the smooth flooring as you drift to Steve’s side. Your knees ache a little when you settle them on the ground. You have the hilarious thought of: _fuck, I’m getting old._

You turn your grin against the back of Steve’s hand when you pick it up. Here is indulgence if you’ve ever seen it. Greedy man, you think, and you think: careful, careful, careful. You want to touch his hair but that’s too much. (You want to _touch, you want--_ )

What do you want? Really, what do you want?

This. Steve’s hand between both of yours. This. Him.

Him.

Your lips rest at the crease between his thumb and hand. His skin smells like nothing in particular, beyond the clinging antiseptic, hospital scent. You can hear the blood move through his arteries. He’s warm. The shield-made callouses have a nice texture to them, you can feel their ridges, rises and dips even with your metal fingertips. Not fair, any, all of it. How many iterations of you can he catch. Why him, why, why. Why this man, and you, any, all of them. You wish you killed him long ago, before you got to this place. You wish he died of asthma in a husk of house, or a chair leg to the gut, mean green eyes the last thing he saw. You wish you both died together in the war, bitten to chunks by a bomb.

You set his hand down and sit on your heels, watching him breathe. You watch for too long and you hate it. You hate him.

But, fuck, you want--

-

If he could--if you, if you could. If you could just--

_Where’s my mind? I’ve misplaced it, have you seen it around?_

-

I wish I may, I wish I might. Find me in the cold cold, dark dark night. Find me, find me. Catch me if you can. (You can’t.)

-

Realign.

-

But if _I_ get all the knives in all the worlds--

-

You fight, because of course you do, because your anger is whip fast and spitting like hot oil. And you’ve got arguments trapped in your chest, buzzing wasps that sting him again and again. He takes it, and takes it, until finally--and you can’t be sure if you’re relieved or more the furious for it--he doesn’t.

-

His eyes say, _fuck you_ , and he steps too close, bumping against you, breathing fast and loud through his nose.

You shove him away, both hands pushing against his chest. He skids back a few feet. “That’s it?” he laughs, actually fucking laughs. This is too real. He’s stretching you too thin and you both know it. This is Russian Roulette with one empty chamber. Put the gun down, Steve, you think.

“Come on,” he says. “Come on, Buck, come the fuck on.” You hit him, left fist, his cheekbone flares red instantly, eye welling up with tears.

He steadies himself and faces you again. His body is an open canvas, waiting patient to be painted with your violence. Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him. You hit him again, twice, left fist, left fist, cheek, nose. Right fist, you can feel his skin split under your knuckles, once, mouth.

“Really?” He spits blood on the ground. It splatters onto your shoes. “Christ, pal, that all you got?” he goads. “That all you got, really?”

Kick to the ribs. You can hear them crack. Breath knocked out of him, you take him to his knees. You got one arm pulled behind his back. His elbow pops out. You grab a fistful of his hair and slam him on the ground.

He braces himself with one flat hand against the ground, shoves himself to his feet. He pushes his dislocated elbow back in with a hiss. “Come on, I know you got more.”

He blocks the next couple punches, but then you land three, rapid fire, right on his broken ribs. He coughs blood and stumbles back. He finally lands a right hook to your shoulder, blocks your immediate defensive move. You grapple and he sweeps your legs out from under you. You twist, and land over him, hands pinning him by his collarbone. With a enough pressure you could break this bone. You could break his breastbone and the rest of his ribs. You could push and push him into destruction. Not a single hit, just the right amount of force at the right place.

No, not destruction. You force yourself to think it: you could kill him.

All at once, your rage cools, leaving you cold and clammy with sweat.

“That it?”

“Yeah,” you say, hoarse.

Steve looks at you. He looks pissed. “Okay,” he nods. “You good?”

“Yeah.” No. Yes. Your blood buzzes. You’d like to cut your hands off, maybe. Exposed bone, exposed wires. You’d like to go back in time ten minutes and never come into the room.

“I’m gonna go,” he waves at his face. He pushes at your shoulder, lightly. You scramble off of him and then hesitate, unsure if you should help him stand up. He’s on his feet while you’re still deliberating and walking towards the bathroom, steps hitching in pain.

You shake yourself and race past him for the first aid kit. “I got it. Go sit down.”

“I can--”

“Too late.” You twist your body past and he sighs, grumbling. A smile twitches your mouth and you flip open the kit on the coffee table. He sinks into the couch, grabs his nose and resets it without a sound.

You touch his ribs and he winces automatically before schooling his features. A night’s sleep and they’ll be healed. Not broken after all. You focus on his face, clean the blood up, and start dabbing ointments over the bruises, sticking band-aids over the cuts. They say, SHARK ATTACK and NINJA FIGHT and DANCE OFF.

You snort.

“What?”

You hold up the bandage. “You can’t dance.”

Steve laughs, groans, then laughs at his own pain. “I guess that’s why I need the band-aid.” He grins. He fucking grins, still bloody from Bucky--from your fist. He rifles through the box and holds up one that says JOUSTING. “Use this one,” he says, all childish excitement.

“You’d make a worse jouster than dancer,” you say, but you set down the band-aid in your hand and take his instead, smoothing it gently across the bridge of his nose.

“I could beat a shark, though, right?”

“Yeah, pal, ‘course.”

“And a ninja.”

“I don’t know bout that. I’ve seen you and Natasha spar.”

“I’ve seen you and Natasha spar.”

“Oh have you now.” You raise an eyebrow and he blushes, too easy.

“Don’t be immature,” he says, like _you’re_ the one who goes red to the ears anytime something sexual is remotely insinuated. You clean him up efficiently, but carefully, as to not provoke new pain. He sighs, hisses, hums.

“I am sorry,” you say. Your voice is small. Ashamed. This is new. You don’t like it. You don’t like Steve’s small winces of pain or the color of his bruises. You don’t like this aftermath. Everything is better at the beginning; that’s where it all should end. No second acts or contemplation. A violent explosion that takes you with it. Caught up in your own blast radius. Why are you left surviving the beasts in your ribcage, watching the ruins you made? Fury is a visceral and present emotion, it has no concerns about the future.

“Ah, I know.” He pats your arm, uncoordinated. He leans forward until his shoulder slumps against yours. He’s warm, smells sour with blood and sweat. You don’t move away. “I think it was good for us.”

This startles a laugh out of you. Steve smiles like he’s won the lottery. “Sam would disagree.”

His smile softens. “And he’d probably be right, like usual. And I ain’t saying this should be a, uh, regular thing. But I don’t know. It was cathartic, sorta, right?”

You stifle the urge to roll your eyes. “Sure, Rogers.”

Steve sticks his fingers in his mouth and squints, tilts his head back. His jaw works and his wrist tweaks back and forth. He pulls his hand back, a tooth pinched between forefinger and thumb. “Huh. Think it’ll grow back?”

“Maybe. If it doesn’t, I can knock out the rest of them for you so it’ll match.”

Steve laughs and then clutches his chest. His groan of pain tapers back into a chuckle, breathless, eyes sparkling. “Thanks, Buck. I really appreciate that.”

You grin, knocking your hand against his knee. “Here to help, pal.”

-

“I was thinking," says Steve.

“That's never good.”

“Ha ha,” Steve rolls his eyes. “No I was thinking.” He wipes his palms on his jeans. The tips of his ears flame. “I was thinking I wanna quit.”

You blink. “Quit?”

“Yeah, I--I mean not completely, of course. If there's a threat against the earth, of course I'll help wherever they need me." _Don't tell them that, Stevie,_  you think. _The smallest job will be called the biggest threat if you tell them that._ "But for my day to day I'm just tired of--I'm--" he huffs a laugh, staring down at his hands. “I’m tired."

You unstick your tongue from the roof of your mouth. “What would you do?”

“I know it's…” he scruffs his hair and looks up. “I got some ideas for a web comic, maybe. I've also been working on a few big pieces, just, I'm starting to get a hang of the tablet and--but I thought maybe I could even take some classes, for a while. I'm pretty rusty. And between some savings I made since I got back and all that back pay still, I mean, we've got time to figure it out.”

“We?”

He smiles, nervous, shy. “Well, yeah. And of course you, I mean you know what you want, but if you ever want to get out too, we'd both be fine. Financially, y’know.”

Who are you without your monsters, your blood and your not-blood? Your ugliness and spitefulness and killng killing killing? Who are you?

You stare through him and he stares at you and eventually his blue eyes come into focus and you ask, “What's the comic about?” and you anchor yourself to his beaming response with all you have.

-

“Hey,” Steve says, grinning. “Guess what?”

You raise an eyebrow.

“It grew back!” He parts his lips and hooks a finger in his mouth, showing off his shiny new tooth. You can’t help but laugh. It wells up inside you and pours out like a sob. You’re elated and it’s terrible and strange and he’s beautiful, Steve, with his impossible tooth and his big, silly grin. You hold your breath until you’re forced to swallow all the words flooding your mouth.

-

“Do you want tea?” she asks.

“No,” you say. She makes hot chocolate and pours mini marshmallows into a bowl. You drop in handfuls until they overflow from your mug, and then you shove five into your mouth to chew on.

“So,” you say, mouth full and sticky. Natasha taps her beige painted nails to the blue ceramic of her mug. Everything about her is particular; the knives on her body, the red of her hair, the round of her eyes. She is so deliberate. Her stillness, her breathing; she makes the uncontrollable appear as though it answers to her, first. She could fool you into believing she knew all your secrets. So it’s not that you don’t respect her; so it’s not that you don’t fear her. But you control nothing, no one, and you’re impatient, and you don’t care to hide it. She could pluck it out of you, anyway.

Strands of hair flutter out from behind her ear as she tilts her head; you swear she could control the wind, with that delicate sway. You like a good liar, a good legend, a good stone person, soft as marshmallow and still able to convince a fellow crack in the glass that she’s seamless.

“So nothing,” she says. “So drink your hot chocolate. Sit with me. Leave if you want. We’re in each other’s lives, the only choice we have is how civil we are to one another.” Natasha slurps her hot chocolate. You smile; you can feel your eyes crinkle. You lean back, slow.

“Were you in Brazil, in 94’?”

“What month?”

You chew at your bottom lip. “Can’t remember.”

She smiles, lifts an eyebrow. “Neither can I.”

You want to spit melted marshmallow and chocolate all over her pristine granite countertop and laugh until you can’t see. You grin with teeth and she matches you, canine for canine.

“What are we smiling about?” Sam asks. He drops a kiss to Natasha’s head as he passes, opening the fridge.

“Old memories,” says Natasha, monotone. You snort into your mug. There is something particular, direct, cherished in the way she looks back at Sam. You know she sees you notice. You lift your cup, take a slow sip. She’s waving a weakness around like a flag. You don’t understand and it makes your skin itch.

Sam chugs some orange juice and sniffs at his workout shirt. “Nice seeing you, Bucky,” he calls, before disappearing down the hallway. Natasha matches your sip, lowers her mug when you do.

“Friends trust each other,” she says.

“You don’t trust me,” you state.

“True,” says Natasha, “but we have to start somewhere.” And the most bizarre of all things: she sounds like she means it. Well. You do like a good liar.

You raise your mug in cheers, and clink it with hers.

-

You want: a pork roast, a thousand dollars cash, to be able to get drunk. You roll up a dirty dollar bill. Someone lost a round of poker in the corner. Two women are feeding each other tiny, bright pills on a couch. You dump the coke you stole on the table, next to crumpled food, condom, and gum wrappers.

You lean back into the chair. Nothing. Probably for the best.

Your head stretches all the way back. The ceiling stares down on you, vast and white and mocking. There’s a bad feeling in the tips of your fingers.

-

Your shoulders hit the alley wall, you suck on your cigarette. It’s all placebo with them, but there’s something so goddamn satisfying about that first inhale, the weight of it resting between your fingers. You flick ash to the ground.

You could--you _might_ say, later, that you didn’t plan it or you were frenzied or something to shift the judgement a few degrees away from you. But this is how it really (really, really, real: like your arm and head and heart) happens.

He’s just there. His hand braced on the wall. He vomits and then washes his mouth out with beer. You don’t choose to--maybe you just choose to not choose not to. Riddle me this, agent. You don’t say that, but later you’ll sort of wish you did.

Transportation is easy. First thing you do after getting him to the apartment (after tying him up, _of course_ ) is cut out his tongue. Metal, blood, blood. You stuff a towel into his mouth. He looks at you, all sad, pained. Tears in his eyes. Clumping his lashes together. Those go next.

(The eyes! The eyes! What better to hurt you with--you never got that fairy tale, how does Red not see the wolf in the bed? Maybe she’s the wolf. She’s the wolf sneaking up on a liar, swallowing him whole. Isn’t that justice? Maybe she needed glasses.)

You get bored after a while. Bye-bye fingers, bye-bye toes. You should have left his eyes so you could see his fear. Knife in his knee. You barely even register it. Bor-ing. You cut his throat. The blood spills over his shirt, drips off the chair to the ground. Drips and drops. Spills and keeps spilling. The whole apartment fills with his blood. You drown in it.

He stumbles over a pile of trash onto the sidewalk. Vomit chunks cling to his chin, illuminated by the streetlights. You cigarette hisses and dies in a puddle of something. You stuff your hands into your pockets and look up at the black sky.

-

It’s cold. Snow on the ground. Makes the dirt hard with ice. A nice, satisfying snap of ice crystals and rock.

Blade of dirt, heft, repeat. If you killed the man in the alley you’d bury him here. Shitty hiding spot, but maybe that’s the point, maybe you’d want to be caught. You entertain the idea for a moment. Imagine: you and Steve going on the run. Bonnie and Clyde. You fuck in filthy motel rooms. He still thinks he can dive down deep enough inside you to find your soul. Heart spelunking. He’ll search and search and never lose his conviction that it exists.

Or, he’ll face it and come out the other side. Wouldn’t that be a thing. Him on his hands on knees scrubbing blood stains from cheap carpeting. Plastic and bleach, not even flinching when they screamed.

Not a bad life, all things considered.

You drop the rest of the baggie into the hole in the ground. Very symbolic, you think. A few shovels of dirt covers the cocaine. Should you say a few words? Here lies some stolen coke. It did jack shit for me. Fuck you.

You whistle a song you can’t name while you walk back home. The night is crisp. Void above, striped asphalt below. Someone almost runs you over in the middle of a pedestrian pathway. You flip off their honks without even looking, grinning broadly. Some things, you suppose, with a degree of what could be comfort, never change.

-

THIS IS YOU

Lipstick on the mirror. Natasha's: stolen. Of course, stealing from Natasha means she let you steal it. So, maybe--Natasha’s: borrowed.

You lean in. Draw a wide, red circle around your reflected face. You think,

This is you! This is you, this is you, you, you! Look at you! Your chin and eyes and mouth! Your ears! Your hair! Your eyes! Your eyes! This is you!

This is you. This is you. This is me. This is him. This is us. Us? Me: you.

Or--us? Me: all of them.

You lean in with the lipstick again. Draw a big question mark in the middle of the waxy circle. Your reflection is fragmented, now. Your bones calm down. Yes, you think. There you are. This is you.

-

You can’t carve yourself apart in the same apartment as Steve. You open the curtains and sit cramped against the wall under the window, notebook on your knees. Stick man, pencil. You fill it out a bit. Hands and feet and head. You stab the arms. Of course, that really only works with the right. You shade out the left completely, and break through the page sketching blood spurts arcing from the right.

Face: nice big X’s. Lots of lines, representing sharp things. Your skin feels less like poison, but your body feels emptier. What are you when you’re not filled with violent thoughts?

You consider stuffing the drawing into your mouth, chewing the tough paper for hours.

Instead, you rip it up into tiny squares and let them float out of the window and down to the street.

iii.

Here’s where you fuck up: you forget, for a second, what you are. Maybe you’re Sam Wilson, a person, or maybe you’re Natasha Romanoff, a very good person imposter, or you could be Steve Rogers, someone who used to be a person. But the truth is you’re _you_. You are a God’s knife. Rusty, rusty. Out of commission and time, spinning down a drain, or in outer space. You don’t exist but for all the ways you have been a symptom. The effect of someone else’s cause. But you have no footholds, and your palms are tractionless. There is nothing to hold onto, there is nothing to stop. This is it: you, falling--down, down, down, until the black swallows you whole up and you disintegrate into it.

-

Steve turns on a heel and vomits in the corner. He braces himself with one flat palm against the wall. “Good _God_ ,” he says, hoarse, and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

Good _God_ , you want to mimick, to mock. _God_. Oh me, oh my. Golly gosh gee, Rogers, what a sight. What a shit show.

Good God is right, you think. Good God, good boy, good little god boy with your hands all red and tongue chewed up.

Your hands are so red and wet. It’s sick. You feel sick, almost; your body’s cold, inside and out and the world looks like you’re squinting out a screen door.

You kiss him on the mouth. Horror hangs in the air, still. He exhales through his nose, loud, hot on your skin.

“Fuck, Buck, I--” Fuck Buck. Fucky Bucky. You laugh.

He flinches back, draws his brows together, concerned. Jeez. You need to loosen up a bit if laughter has him this freaked out. You press forward, grinning against his lips. You pin him to the wall with both hands, like a butterfly to a board. Pretty Steve with his soft, sweet-corn hair. Baby blues. Big iridescent wings. Pretty as a bug. His shoulders slump and a high whine builds in his throat. You lick sounds out of him until he’s squirming.

Not fair, probably, to him: this. But. But, but, but. His lips are so sweet, his fingertips press tiny bruises into your skin he’s clinging so hard. For a second you think you’d try, for him. You’d slither into whatever skin he wanted.

“Bucky,” he says, so goddamn softly. Ah, well. It’s the thought that counts, right?

(Because here you are--here _you_ are--brutal you, real hot heart beating, beating, and he says your--his--your name like some sort of prayer. Weaker men have caved for less. You’ve never been known for your will, anyway.)

“Sorry,” you lie, not for the kiss, but for the bodies.

“It’s--” okay, he doesn’t finish. You can’t blame him. “You did what you had to.”

“That’s not true.” He flinches. Good. You kiss him again and he melts like cotton candy, whimpering like candy to your ears.

“I’m sorry you had to--I’m sorry I wasn’t--”

Jesus _fucking_ Christ he is so goddamn motherfucking unbelievable. You kiss him harder, just to shut him the fuck up.

“I’m,” he swallows, stepping back to create some distance, and breathes through the thick gore in the air, “I’m okay, we, we should--I’m--I’m gonna--” He picks his way around the mess of Hydra agents and technicians and guards and officers and secretaries.

Bucky sits down on the ground; blood gets on your pants. There are so many truths that only live inside you, and it makes them lonely truths, safe, isolated honesties that belong to no one else in the universe. One of them is this: when you stepped into this room you thought, _I don’t belong here._ Steve was twitching softly on the examination table. The overkill was for you, the bloodlust you’ve come to adore inside yourself. But it didn’t matter, not Steve, not your body, or the death. You don’t belong with Hydra. No matter they built you, no matter they made you. Fist hits jaw; jaw hits fist. All things push and pull and touch, give, take, react. But you’re an object in motion, cut loose from these hands. Not even their violence is familiar. You have mutated so completely. You have grown so organically. You are everything they made you and everything buried so deep beneath that they didn’t know how to reach for it, let alone shape it. You are immense, and immensely monstrous, and you are _you_ , and it is good.

-

“Not a great first kiss,” you guess.

Steve doesn’t look you in the eye. That’s just fine, because his hand reaches out, twines with your metal fingers so tight you think something creaks.

“You can’t,” he starts, then sighs. He is some kind of monument, head bent, spine arched, heavy with suffering and a full heart. “Thank you for coming for me. But you can’t--do what you did in there. That was--it just--I’m not saying they didn’t deserve it. After all they did to you, you have every right to want revenge, I understand, but--but there lines, Buck, I mean--you get it, right?” He turns his head without lifting his eyes. What desperation. What a desperate creature you’ve made him.

“I get it,” you say. But you’d do it again. You might again, still. And, oh, the look in his eyes, he knows it. “You know I’m trying.”

A cheap shot; he crumples instantly, eyes so soft and large and blue. “Of course. I know.”

He could excuse you anything. You almost laugh. You kiss him; it feels stolen. He drops his head to your shoulder. You work some blood out of the crevice along the chamber of your gun with your fingernail. Your mind swirls with thoughts of ugly cloth couches, flaying yourself strategically, a life beyond, up, up, up.

-

Steve is trying to gauge the ripeness of a peach with his hands.

“Does this look good to you?” he asks, squinting against the glare of the midday sun. Sam and Natasha are bickering over the blueberry stand. She argues color, he argues size. Farmer’s market patrons bump and jostle you, moving from vendor to vendor, and you let them.

The peach is small and round and pink-yellow-orange. You don’t know if you can’t remember what peaches taste like or if you just don’t know. You take it from his hand and bite a chunk out.

Steve laughs, smacks his open palm over his face. “Well,” he says to the peach-seller, with a disarming grin, “I guess we’ll take that one.”

The peach is sweet and soft. You suck the juice off your fingers, in between your knuckles and rolling down your wrist bone. The pit you flick on the ground as you and Steve walk towards his friends. Sam Wilson is eating cinnamon sugar almonds. You take a handful--sweet and crunchy and hot.

“Take the bag, dude, you need the calories more than me.” Sam smiles at you, eyes crinkled behind his sunglasses. Natasha leans in and whispers something to him and he snorts.

You shove another handful of almonds in your mouth. The day is a strange one. Bright, warm, filled with people and smells. Baked bread and fresh fruit and artificial perfumes, tall moms with big strollers and small children with sticky hands and old men with canes and young-ish people with strange hair. New York is not what you remember. You don’t remember it, anyway, but even so you know your non-memories are of something else.

You think this isn’t so bad, though. The odd people and smells. Maybe this is what you don’t remember, just with some new layers of history. Steve picks almonds out of your bag, casually popping them into his mouth with one hand. He and Sam make faces at each other that hold whole conversations. Natasha is haggling, trying to get ten dollars off a seagrass basket.

Steve is holding your hand, lightly, loosely, fingers just linked together. His skin is smooth and a little warm.

“I’m buying that hat,” you say, and pull him through the crowd. The hat is wide-brimmed with a pointy crown, two gold tassels dangling off the front, swirling neon pink and green and yellow and orange patterning it. You pay full price and pat it on Steve’s head.

He tilts the brim back, revealing his sparkling eyes, smiling. “How do I look?”

“Awful,” you answer, honest.

He nods, pleased. “Thanks, Buck.”

“Well, well, well,” Sam says, whistling, low. “Cowboy America. I’m afraid there’s only enough room in this town for one of us.” Sam is wearing a hat nearly as hideous--a blue cotton knit cap with two brown cat ears sticking out the sides--with a smug Natasha preening by his shoulder.

Steve sets his fingers into pistols, resting them by his hips. “Don’t start something you can’t finish, Samuel.”

Sam makes a disgusting noise in the back of his throat and spits on the ground, fingerguns hovering by his waist. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a good ole fashion shootout.”

“You know this can only be decided one way,” says Steve.

“Fight to the death,” you offer.

Sam and Steve step forward and clasp hands. Together, they say, “One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war.”

A brief struggle. Sam’s tongue pokes through his teeth, Steve doesn’t blink. Then: a whoop of joy, an anguished cry.

Steve spins in circle, arms flung up victoriously.

“What the fuck!” Sam yells. “Cheater!”

“I didn't cheat!”

“You did! You can't just flip your freaky arms around like that! The thumb war has no honor if the arm isn't stationary,” says Sam.

“Rematch!” Natasha calls. “I'm refereeing.”

You press up against Steve’s back, rubbing your stubble against his cheek, proprietary.

Natasha is massaging Sam’s shoulders and blowing cool air across his brow. Her voice slips into something low and phony, “Knock his block off!”

“I got this, I got this.” Sam shakes out his limbs, his whole body, hopping back and forth on his feet. It strikes you that this is friendship, or silliness, or something good and small and human, at least. You’re glad to witness it--more than that; you’re glad to be apart of it. You’re glad to be, in that moment. Steve twists his head to kiss your chin and you let him. You lean into it.

-

“Mine.” It’s more grunt than word. His eyelids flutter. Steve settles his hand over yours with a soft squeeze.

“Mm, yeah. ’Course.” You squeeze your hand over his hip, not at all soft. He sighs, tenses, then melts against the mattress. His skin is hot with the new bruise. You lie down completely still next to him and watch him breathe.

-

Fuck, Christ. He’s. You.

He’s Steve. God and you, whoever the fuck, all the lives and decades stacked together to make you--you love him. _Fuck_. It’s hideous, this knowing. You want to kill him to prove something to no one. He loves you, too, the worst of it. All of you. The ones he doesn’t even know. Fuck him.

You pull the blanket up to his ear. What’d he do to him--you--Bucky, all that time ago, to leave a mark this deep. You wish you could ask.

_I wish I may, I wish I might._

-

It’s cliche, it’s all a cliche, because what does it matter? Here, at the end or the beginning or the middle of all things? You can philosophize about your past like a neckbearded college fuck with a shirt covered in grease stains and hands packed full of ego and you can pretend to understand all the cracks and fissures inside the grey matter of the black hole of your skull--and you can call yourself things like dangerous and animal and plant lies behind the eyes of people you don’t know, not at all. You can shape this world to fit whatever consciousness you want lurking underneath your skin at any moment. The truth is what you decide it’s going to be. And you’re a dramatic fucking murderer, you kill and kill and you like it sometimes and other times you don’t. And you breathe, eat, shit, fuck, kill. Everything left unsatisfied, everything mean. And you wake up in the morning with the rest of the world, and you don’t matter a fucking hair more than they do. In the end, or middle, or beginning, you’re just another ant crawling on a rock, half metal but all human, scarred and scarring, scared and trying as much as you pretend you aren’t. All the pretense, all the self-obsessed bullshit, all the obnoxious hooks pretending to be poetry: you’re just a goddamn person.

-

If this (specifically: him, the way he smiles at you when he first wakes up, apples on your pillowcase, warm buttered toast for breakfast, the breeze curling the curtains, his hand on your hand, his mouth on your cheek, his heart in your chest; generally: your mind, the earth, the sun, lightyears of emptiness and starlight) is real--which: honestly unlikely--then you think this might be happiness. You’re not an expert. Compared to other (questionably) real people it definitely wouldn’t qualify.

You’re eating a tomato. Size of a baseball, gleaming red. You bite into it, green seeds and sweet juice spilling down your neck, soaking into your shirt. Steve laughs at you.

“Get me a napkin.”

“Get it yourself,” he laughs between his words. His smile’s big enough to hold sonnets. You kiss him. Tomato-sweet, poetry lips. Happiness--or at least: close enough.


End file.
